Improvement of Interactive Learning Support System with Adaptive Vocabulary Lists

We have developed an English learning support system with adaptive vocabulary lists. In this paper, we improve our previous system in order to promote more effective autonomous learning by interactive communication among students and teachers. Our previous system could evaluate the English level of any materials on the web by using multiple standard vocabulary lists and could support the teachers to select suitable materials for the students. However, it was hard for the teachers to add new information effectively to the materials and receive any feedback from the students. Here, we adopt the concept of virtual class in the system. Thus, the teacher of a class can easily send additional useful information about the materials (such as the important words, the key sentences, the hints, and so on) to all the students who are registered to the class. In addition, the students in a class can communicate with the other students and the teacher, and they can easily point out their problems in the materials (such as too high-level words and difficult phrases). This interactive communication is expected to support the teachers to make more suitable materials adaptively because they can receive the feedback directly from the current students. We refined our previous system and conducted a questionnaire survey to verify the improvement of the system.